alt Hacker NewsReading through that site, it seems like instead of locking yourself into a corporations app, you're locking it into his instead. He doesn't seem to want to run an open source community, he's building an app for himself and publishing it for people who have exactly the same use case as him.
True, but you don't need to install updates once you have the software installed, and it's probably better not to. The software on the robot doesn't need the app to control, either - it exposes an API that either the app or custom software can talk to, sans cloud servers.